What's up on the smolweb? October 2026 roundup 2026-11-07 13:00 November has arrived, the leaves are turning, and the smolnet is doing what it always does: quietly growing, debating, and building. Here is what happened in October 2026 on the small web, the smolnet, and around the Gemini protocol. Geminispace in late October: 5,128 known capsules, 3,033 recently connected The Lupa crawler (Stephane Bortzmeyer's Geminispace survey) was last updated on November 7, 2026. It currently lists ...

One of a human’s earliest developmental milestones is an understanding of object permanence. It generally takes less than a year for a baby to realize that when an adult hides their face behind their hands in a game of peek-a-boo, they don’t cease to exist. There’s more to the world around us than what we perceive. This suggests — or at least, it suggested to Albert Einstein — that the world is… Source One of a human’s earliest developmental milestones is an understanding of obj...

Given I talk about Alpine being my Linux server distro of choice, I feel it important to relay this : If you run sshd on Alpine Linux, update openssh now and restart sshd. Upgrading the package alone does not replace the running daemon. If you cannot update yet, at least disable password logins: set PasswordAuthentication no in your sshd configuration and restart sshd. Either one closes the hole. The OpenSSH team were also quick to issue a workaround with 10.6p1 : This release ...

Many organizations adopting data mesh and data products face a common challenge. They may be tasked with building a self-service platform for data products and data mesh from scratch, or they may have an existing platform that suffers from low adoption, preventing their data mesh from scaling. This article provides a platform navigator, based on the CNCF's Platform Engineering Maturity Model, to help you reason about your current situation and determine the next ste...

Leaves moulting by day Nature’s layers, all visible — Silver veins: the heart. Leaves moulting by day Nature’s layers, all visible — Silver veins: the heart. Leaves moulting by day Nature’s layers, all visible — Silver veins: the heart.

Buffered output typically comes in two flavors: fully buffered and line buffered. If output goes to a terminal then the implementation automatically selects line buffering, flushing its buffer when a line is completed so that it reaches the user immediately. Otherwise it fully buffers, holding output until the buffer is full or an explicit flush event at some arbitrary point in the future. Line buffering is a common bottleneck in non-interactive terminal applications such that it’s worth redi...

Liz Fong-Jones’s proposal to add maps.Grow was accepted on October 29. It lets you make room in a map that already exists. make(M, n) already does this for a new map. A Go map grows on its own as you add entries. When it runs out of room, the runtime allocates a larger hash table and rehashes the entries into it. The old table is left for the garbage collector. A loop that adds thousands of entries can hit this again and again. Each time costs CPU and creates more garbage. If you know ...

Quick Note: I started writing this a few months ago as I finished up the last few bits on the Recovery Kit 3, and some changes delayed things a bit. First, my startup license for Fusion 360 is nearing its end, but miraculously Solid Craft started up and it's been wonderful so far- and the design has actually been finished up on the app. I recognize that Fusion may be included for some of you as your daily profession, but for many hobbyists its format has been a barrier to editing my files. S...

Well here we are again. Linux 7.3 is out and it’s been an eventful few months, so let’s get stuck in to another Asahi Linux progress report! Upstreaming continues As always, upstreaming work continues to progress. Aside from the usual patches for low-level SoC blocks, two major drivers made it on to the list this cycle: macaudio and avd. Getting macaudio ready for submission has been a challenge. The audio subsystem on Apple Silicon devices is rather special, and required quite a number of c...

Fairphone 1: Still going strong after 13 years by Fairphone The Fairphone team talk through two examples of where the original Fairphone 1 from back in 2013 are "still very much in use" , but I think this post is a little disingenuous. Read post ➡ I saw this post on Mastodon, and clicked on it as the title and intro both read like there's people still using their original Fairphone 1 as a daily driver, after more than a decade. This surprised me as Fairphone clearly states that their ph...

Babies cry because they are born with all the knowledge in the world. "Campaign" (originally: Burning Artemis) is the title of an unproduced Doctor Who novel, originally meant to feature in the BBC's Past Doctor Adventures range. The author, Jim Mortimore, self-published the story in 2000, with the proceeds going to charity. A revised PDF version of the book can be found here and read for free! The story features the first Doctor , Susan , Ian and Barbara . Read more on the site...

A store does not go straight into the cache. Waiting for that write would stall the processor. It sits in a store buffer, and a later load can take its bytes from that buffer. That is store forwarding. Forwarding works when the load is the same size as the store, or smaller and completely inside it. It fails when the load is wider than the store, or when the two ranges only partly overlap. The load then waits until the store has reached the cache. Here is an example in C. We have a buffer, t...

It took me the better part of a year to write Software Design by Example in Python . It would have had more impact and a wider readership if I’d done it a decade earlier, but I learned a lot along the way, and I’m proud of it. It took less than ten minutes for DeepSeek to write this lesson explaining how a filesystem works . I told the LLM to read three of the existing lessons, then create one of similar length, depth, and style; it came back with working code and prose that’s as good ...

Practical tools for design engineers to explore possible futures through speculative design Practical tools for design engineers to explore possible futures through speculative design

This is a schematic of the gearing of the Antikythera mechanism, from Tony Freeth’s 2021 Nature paper, “ A Model of the Cosmos in the Ancient Greek Antikythera Mechanism “. In my opinion this is the most comprehensive and well-supported of the several theories which fill in the missing portions of the mechanism. Use this along with the supplementary manuscript and supplementary videos in the link above to figure out how to construct the device (noting my comment on the paper about a small ...

Thailand is the only country in the world which has active civil and scientific space programs and is also party to the US-led Artemis Accords as well as China-led ILRS frameworks for cooperative lunar exploration. Which is why the Moon Village Association’s 10th global lunar symposium piqued my interest since Thailand’s leading space organization, called Geo-Informatics and Space Technology Development Agency ( GISTDA ), co-hosted the event in Bangkok last week on October 26 & 27....

TL;DR: gilguard is a tiny, zero-dependency package for free-threaded Python (3.13t, 3.14t, 3.15t). Import it first. If any later import quietly turns the GIL back on, you get an error naming the extension module, the package that shipped it, and the line of your code that pulled it in. python -m gilguard audits an entire environment in one go. It’s on PyPI now, and it’s the second piece of a larger free-threaded Python effort I’ve been working on. The quiet failure mode of free-thre...

I love working with designers, in part because (unlike managers and product managers) they’re culturally different from engineers. However, having more than one designer on a team is asking for trouble, and I have complicated negative thoughts about design systems. Design is a strange role Designers demonstrate their value immediately. While working on some feature, I’ll typically put together some placeholder UI that I’m reasonably happy with. I then show it to a designer, who strokes...

Acquisition to expand Shield’s Mission Systems business into the fast-growing radar and counter-drone sectors SAN DIEGO and KIRKLAND, Wash. (November 5, 2026) – Shield today announced it has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Echodyne Corp., an industry-leading radar company, in a transaction valued at $5.3 billion. Echodyne radars are built into hundreds of counter-drone and security systems used by defense, government and commercial customers in more than 40 countries. Both c...

I wrote a post several years ago called Don’t Look at the Keys . I wrote it after having a minor breakthrough when starting to get back into a regular piano practice. When I was quite young, my first piano teacher used to tell me: “Don’t look at the keys when you’re playing the piano.” At the time I wrote the post in 2019, I was trying to do more sight reading, and this was a very useful heuristic to re-internalize. When you’re sight reading, it’s necessary to read directly from...

Since I wrote about it , I kept thinking about the topic of webmentions, quoting, embedding, screenshotting, and the overall idea of connecting content on the web. The more I think about it, the more I’m convinced this is two issues wrapped into one, and I suspect there’s no way to perfectly resolve the tension that exists at the core. The first issue is a technological one or how do we make sure content that is related can get connected in a way that’s convenient and can scale across m...

When the Clay Mathematics Institute announced the Millennium Prize Problems back in 2000, we joked that if you proved P = NP, you wouldn't only get the $1 million prize for solving P v NP, but you would get $7 million since you could use P = NP to solve the rest. In theory, if P = NP, then you could efficiently find the proof of any theorem, provided its formal proof was not too long. In practice, we don't have P = NP, and back then we didn't even have a good way to formalize a proof. Fast for...

Yesterday's hot paper was Sparks of Weight-Space Programming: LLMs can natively read & write neural network weights by Rikiya Takehi, Jayden Teoh, Alex Zhang, and Omar Khattab. The paper (OK, the authors classify is as a "blog post", but it's paper-shaped) found that frontier models, in particular GPT-6 Astra, can both interpret and modify the raw weights of a machine learning model - literally a text description of the model containing a bunch of floating point numbers. I've been playing with...